For the peculiar snow-white brow of
Moby Dick, and his snow-white hump, could not but be unmistakable.
And have I not tallied the whale, Ahab would mutter to himself,
as after poring over his charts till long after midnight he would
throw himself back in reveries--tallied him, and shall he escape?
His broad fins are bored, and scalloped out like a lost sheep's ear!
And here, his mad mind would run on in a breathless race;
till a weariness and faintness of pondering came over him!
and in the open air of the deck he would seek to recover
his strength. Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man
endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire.
He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody
nails in his palms.
Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably
vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts
through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies,
and whirled them round and round and round in his blazing brain,
till the very throbbing of his life-spot became insufferable anguish;
and when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him
heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him,
from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends
beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself
yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship;
and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though
escaping from a bed that was on fire.
Pages:
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331
332
333
334
335
336